Watching the Red Eye
by Punctuator
Summary: A mashup with indie comedy "Watching the Detectives." Jackson Rippner picks the wrong time to get jealous. Between that, the terrible title, and the fact that only three people on Earth saw the crossover film, what could possibly go wrong...?
1. Chapter 1

**WATCHING THE RED EYE**

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Hammett would've come up with a better name. Chandler, too. Hell, just about anyone.

But when the mystery guy who looked more like Neil than anyone cared to admit started hanging out in Film Noir and Foreign, on off nights, near or right after sundown, that was the name that stuck. Mystery Guy.

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Actually, it all started with the pizza no one wanted. Sal's was closed for renovation or fumigation, or maybe Sal himself had finally had his reckoning with the guys from either Immigration or the IRS. In any case, Sal's was closed, and the pizza was from Domino's, but the guys had a coupon, which was good because Tuesday was always a slow day (those pricks at Media Giant had their Twofer Tuesdays, and that pretty much sucked all the business away from Gumshoe Video for the day, right there), so the guys— that being Neil and Lucien— they loaded the pie with everything but hubcaps and had it delivered.

So this skinny kid from Domino's brought the pizza, right? And it was almost still hot, because that new heat-retaining cardboard is the cat's pajamas. Lucien was first under the hood, and he was rolling piece one like a burrito so as to keep the grease off the backstock inventory sheets from some sap selling stock from St. Paul, and that's when this guy came up to the counter with a copy of _A History of Violence_ and a cheap thirty-three and said, "Give me all the money."

Neil was by the door, eyeballing his pocket change and a couple of limp dollar bills and wondering if maybe the Domino's kid had managed to stiff him for double the tip. Lucien didn't look up from the inventory sheets. He waved his piece of pizza under the guy's chin— dismissively, he waved it, nonchalantly, like Bette Davis giving Herbert Marshall the breeze with a cigarette in _The Letter_— and said, "From Suriname, too?"

"What the fuck?" said the guy with the gun.

"Yep." Lucien was maybe up to "H" on that inventory list from St. Paul. He took a bite of pizza. He winced— come on, honestly, name one person who doesn't at least half-choke on Domino's— and said, "If you say you want all the money, I'll assume you mean from every country on Earth. Which includes Suriname. Which is a tall order, my friend, because the current exchange rate is—"

About that time the guy with the gun put the barrel of that cheap thirty-three in Lucien's left nostril and hoisted. When they were eye to eye, him and Lucien, the guy said, "Give me. All. The fucking. Money."

"Holy shit." Lucien was looking cross-eyed at the barrel. He wore these heavy black-frame glasses, and he looked like he mugged Peter Sellers in 1965 and stole his whole face. But he must have earned his merit badge in Morse Threat somewhere along the line, too, because he put down the pizza and popped the cash drawer on the old high-top National. Neil, whose place Gumshoe was, was stuck to the floor right inside the doorway. Like someone had replaced the soles of his sneakers with used chewing gum. He couldn't move. The Domino's guy was gone. It was nearly summer, so it was still light out even coming up on seven o' clock. There was sunlight coming through the front window, and it was hot on his right shoulder. There were dust motes floating in it. The light, not Neil's shoulder. The guy with the gun reached across the counter for the money in the till. He took the barrel of the gun out of Lucien's nostril when he did.

That's when Mystery Guy stabbed him.

Came gliding up out of the Foreign section smooth as a shark. Like his feet weren't even touching the floor. Small guy, slender. But you could tell: he could handle himself. Kind of like Alan Ladd, if Alan Ladd had dark hair and that hair needed a cut. Guy usually hovered near _La Belle Noiseuse,_ but not like he was thinking _Should I just pop into the back room for the real thing, the hardcore triple-X, or should I make 'em think I'm arty, even though this **does** essentially boil down to Emmanuelle Beart naked as a jaybird for three hours?,_ not like that: he spent time in the other sections, too, usually when there were other customers around. But he never rented anything. Just hovered. Read the backs of boxes. Watched the store. Always wore a suit. Nothing flashy, but always dressed. No tie, dress shirt open at the throat. Calm and casual. Calm and casual without once seeming like he was trying to come off as calm and casual. Nothing like Fred MacMurray in _Double Indemnity_.

He was calm and casual when he stabbed the goon.

The goon was probably the last one to know. He looked past Lucien's shoulder like he was going to try an old-style "Look—!"-and-grab. Like he was trying to read the titles on the the tapes in the storage cases on the shelves behind the till. He set the gun down. The cylinder made a really soft metallic "thunk" on the glass counter-top. He put his hands palm-down, one on each side of the thirty-three, and fell over.

Mystery Guy was already putting away his knife. Wasn't a folder. Short, narrow blade, matte-black. He'd stuck the blade in the goon's back, just under his left-side ribs. He bent and wiped the blade on the goon's spotty t-shirt. He had a sheath for the knife under his jacket, under his left arm, strapped to his side. Meanwhile, Lucien was reaching for the gun. Tentatively. Not like he was going to try to shoot Mystery Guy with it, more like he couldn't believe it was really there.

"Don't touch that," said Mystery Guy, spotting where Lucien's hand was reaching. Cool as a melon. He straightened the lapels of his suit jacket and added: "Call the police."

He passed Neil on his way out. There was something funny about him, Neil thought. Not just _HOLY FUCKING SHIT HE JUST STABBED A GUY IN MY STORE_ funny. Couldn't put his finger on it. Maybe because he was still frozen to the spot. His metaphorical finger wasn't working all that well. Neither was his brain. Mystery Guy walked past him, out the door, rounded the corner heading east, and, like any Mystery Guy worth his salt, disappeared.

"You assholes ordered a pizza?" In the door, Jon, big guy, sandy-haired, suddenly appeared. Must've come from the direction opposite the one Mystery Guy went. He pushed in past Neil. Walked to the counter, where Lucien was kind of staring slack-jawed at some middle-distance something. Opened the pizza box and took a slice. Looked down. "Man," he said, "is it zombie night already? I must've lost a day." He poked the dead goon with the toe of his Vans. "Jesus, that's realistic. I thought zombie night was Thursday."

"Zombie night _is_ Thursday," said Lucien, focusing in. "Don't be an idiot. Does that look like a zombie to you? Is he moving? Is he lurching? Is he showing latent evidence of early or advanced physical decomposition? Is he—"

"Whoa, there, Einstein." Jon took a bite of pizza and frowned. "There's a gun on the counter."

"No shit," said Lucien.

"Uh, don't touch that." Neil's feet unfroze. He locked the door and flipped the window sign CLOSED-side-out. "Please don't touch that." He eased his way to the front counter and felt his way along behind it, like the store was a ship and that ship was listing.

"That is a _dead man_." Jon, still chewing, moved his frown from the gun to the goon. He also moved his foot about a foot farther away from the goon's back. "What the hell is going on?"

"He tried to hold us up." Neil pawed back between the card files and the tape splicer, looking for the handset to the front-desk phone. "You know that guy who's been hanging out in Foreign and Noir?"

"That little creep in the suits?"

"Yeah. He stabbed him."

"No shit."

"No shit." Neil found the phone between a maquette of _The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms_ and a stack of vintage _Cinefantastiques_. With his thumb a second away from the second "1" in "911," he watched Lucien open the Domino's box. "Umm, maybe the police will want that as evidence."

"Fuck the cops." Lucien defiantly took another slice.

"Yeah— fuck 'em." Jon reached for a second slice of his own. About then, he finally got around to reading the writing on the box. "No: fuck _this_. Who the hell ordered Domino's?"

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It was, Neil thought much later, a pretty quiet night, all things considered. Only three little details got in the way. One: that goon who got killed in the store. Granted, he'd been trying to rob Lucien at gunpoint, and once word got out, it'd probably be great for business on gangster night, but still. Two— and this was the weird one, the one that really got Neil kind of spooked— was what Lucien said, or didn't say, when the cops asked him for a description of Mystery Guy, and for a second Lucien looked long and hard at Neil without saying anything at all, just before he said, "Like the love-child of Peter Lorre and Alan Ladd, if Alan Ladd had dark hair and went nowhere but Great Clips," and the cops chalked it up to shock and let it drop. And the third thing, which Neil, in retrospect, should have seen coming, only he was kind of in shock, too, was later, when Lucien and Jon had gone home, and Neil, who was locking tomorrow morning's change in the office before shutting up for the night, thought he heard the front door open and close, even though he was about ninety percent sure he'd had it locked, and then something heavy hit him in the back of the head and the world went black. Because, honestly, now that he was on the radar, in a manner of speaking, now that he'd made himself visible by stabbing the goon, tonight was really the only night Mystery Guy could make a move.

Right?

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When Neil came to, he was upside down. He was hanging from the ceiling fan in his office by a rope around his ankles. His hands were tied behind his back. He was stripped down to his underwear. And the world was slowly spinning backwards.

Mystery Guy was walking counter to the motion of the fan. He was looking down at Neil's face with eyes like two blue ice-chips.

"Welcome to the party, Mr. Lewis," he said. "_A Woman's Face._ Ring any bells?"

Neil had the uncomfortable sense that he was joining a conversation already in progress.

Joan Crawford. Conrad Veidt. Cukor directing. "Satan in a tuxedo," Veidt had said of his part. Went out four, five times in the past six weeks. Always to the same person. Always the same name on the slip. _A Woman's Face._ A woman's name—

"Holy shit," Neil said. "You're Lisa's boyfriend."

"_Whose_ boyfriend, Neil?"

"Miss—" He stopped. He couldn't think. The blood was starting to boom in his skull. His tonsils felt like phone poles stuffed in his throat. All he could see was a pile of rental slips. Titles. Most of them for MGM or RKO mellers, late thirties, early forties. Grant, Hepburn. More Crawford. Crawford and Gable. Her name wasn't Crawford. Even less was it Gable. She had a million-watt smile, romance-novel-auburn hair that even curled softly, too, down around her shoulders, and legs that went all the way—

"Reisert's—?"

"That's better."

Thank God. But, hell, Neil's skull felt like it was going to burst, and he could practically smell oil burning overhead. Or overfoot. "This is getting—Would you shut off the fan? Please? It's a Hunter; it was really expensive; the motor's going to fry—"

"I think you have more important things to think about, Neil," said Lisa Reisert's boyfriend.

And with that he took out the knife.

The knife he'd used when he stabbed the goon. Back when he was Mystery Guy.

Neil, inverted, minnow-twisted sideways at the shoulders, trying to keep an eye on that matte-black blade as he rotated. He stammered in lieu of fainting outright: "Wha— wha— what— Stop. What are you doing—?"

"I'll ask the questions, Neil. May I ask the questions, Neil?"

"You just _said_ you were— Yes. Yes, you may ask the questions, Neil. I mean— Oh, shit—"

"Thank you. One: describe in fifty words or less your personal philosophy regarding flirting with one's customers."

"That's a statement."

Mystery Guy touched the tip of the knife daintily to the tip of Neil's nose. "It's a question."

"It's a question." Neil looked cross-eyed at the knife-tip. "My mi-mi-mistake."

Mystery Guy smiled at him. Patiently, almost. "And so: continue."

What the hell could he say? He'd known that Lisa Reisert had a boyfriend— no, he couldn't say it like that, or that knife would end up stuck where he'd just as soon it wasn't. No: she'd told him about her fiance, and how his job took him way out of town, and some nights, just some, when the apartment got lonely, she'd stop off at Gumshoe after work and join the gang— Neil, Lucien, Buddy, Jon, whoever else might have gravitated in— for a movie or Trivial Pursuit. That was all. Hell, yes, she was gorgeous. You'd have to be blind or the Pope not to see that. And she had a genuinely sweet personality to go with those looks. That rare one-two punch. Did Neil and the guys have a crush on her? Hell, yes, they did. Jon summed it up after she left one night, after hammering them, to their eternal shock and awe, in Sports. "Snow White and the seven dorks," he said.

"There's three of us," Lucien said, looking at Neil and Jon.

"I will hurt you," Jon said. "Shut up."

But Neil had a girl, and Lisa was obviously nuts for her guy—

— her Mystery Guy. Holy fuck.—

— and it just _wasn't done_.

But then, before Neil could explain _how_ it wasn't done, how it wouldn't be decent hitting on someone plainly over the moon for someone else, whether any of those someones were customers or not, before he could fish fifty words or less out of the blood flooding his cerebellum, _she_ walked in. No, not Lisa Reisert. Violet. Neil's girl. Behind Mystery Guy. Violet, who managed to make "Asian," "exotic," and "freckled" the hottest trio of adjectives on the planet. Violet, whose legs in a miniskirt also went all the way up. Most importantly, for the sake of the capillaries starting to yodel in Neil's brain, Violet who should have walked in about three minutes earlier, this being obviously another of her pranks, though for all the crazy shit she'd pulled (and there were times she gave Susan Vance in _Bringing Up Baby_ a run for her money in the nuts sweeps), she'd never erred on the side of potential property damage. Property damage to Neil or Gumshoe, anyway. Through the rope binding his ankles, he was starting to feel a wobbly slip-and-pull: the fan was working free of the ceiling.

But it was weird, he thought. Not the fact that he was hanging upside down from a ceiling fan while some psycho Alan Ladd knockoff stuck a knife in his face and quizzed him on relationship etiquette.

No, weird in that, for once, Violet wasn't laughing.

She walked in and stopped dead, without a word. She was behind Mystery Guy. He didn't hear her come in. He didn't turn.

She stood there for maybe a three-count, and it was like she was reading a sign on the back of Mystery Guy's head. A sign that said **HIT ME**.

Which she did. With, as it turned out, the fake Oscar Neil kept on top of the bookshelf just inside the office door.

She hefted the Oscar by its gleaming golden head and shoulders, swung back, and cracked Mystery Guy in the back of the skull with the base. He grunted and dropped like all the stuff that's good at dropping. Rocks, a ton of bricks, a sack of potatoes. He hit the carpet, flopped onto his back, and stayed there with his eyelids locked down tight.

"Who is that?" Violet asked.

"I could ask you the same— fuck, my head—"

"Right now?"

"What—?"

"I wasn't interrupting anything, was I?"

"Interrupting" was wearing either italics or a jacket made of quotation marks. Just as it was in the preceding sentence.

It was just about then that Neil re-realized he was wearing nothing but his boxers. And they had to be the white ones with little yellow smiley faces all over them.

"No, of course you weren't inter— Oh, hell. Help. Violet, please: get me down—"

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Between a fair bit of hoisting, lifting, and twisting, Neil descended. So, too, with an almighty crash, in a shower of plaster chips from the ceiling, did the fan. Throughout it all, Mystery Guy stayed where he was.

Flat on his back on the rug.

Out.

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Violet was studying the base of the Oscar. "I didn't know you wrote _2001: A Space Oddity_."

"_Odyssey_."

"Sorry. There's a little drop of blood right there."

"I didn't." Keeping a nervous eye on Mystery Guy, Neil went to his desk, reached for the phone. Cops. What they needed now was cops. Lots of cops.

"You falsified a Tony? Isn't that illegal?"

"Oscar. It's an Oscar."

"Weird. He looks more like a 'Tony' to me." She set the Oscar on the edge of the desk and put her hand over the hand Neil had on the telephone receiver. "What do you think you're doing?"

"I'm calling the police, obviously."

"Obviously, you're not."

"What am I doing, then?"

"He tied you up. He was threatening you. He totally broke your fan."

"What are you suggesting we— No. You're crazy. Absolutely not. We can't hold him for ransom."

"You're right." Violet reached casually for the Oscar. "Better we should just finish the job."

"Finish the job?" Neil picked up the receiver again as Violet turned back toward Mystery Guy. The desk phone was a genuine antique, and a rotary, and the dial took its sweet time rolling back home once you hauled it to a number. He wedged the receiver between his shoulder and his ear and asked as he dialed a "9": "What the hell does that mean—?"

"Maybe we should put down some plastic sheeting first," Violet said, thoughtfully, twisting the toe of her canvas loafer into the threadbare Oriental knockoff that covered the floor in the vicinity of Neil's desk. "Getting blood out of these old carpets is really tough."

Neil, with the tip of his index finger in the hole for "1," watched as she went to stand over Mystery Guy.

Then he watched as, nonchalantly, she sized up the distance to Mystery Guy's head and swung back the Oscar.

He dropped the receiver. It hit the desktop with a solid bauxite thunk and bounced onto the floor. Neil exploded out from behind the desk, tangling his right ankle in the curlicue receiver cord, and grabbed the wrist of the hand that was hoisting the Oscar. "The hell—No!"

Violet frowned at him. "He wrecked your fan."

"Well, technically, _we _wrecked the fan, but—"

"He owes you. Tell me he doesn't."

Neil looked in her eyes, and, between the excess of blood loitering in his brainpan and the lingering effects of, well, being scared shitless, the crazy became contagious. As, him being with her, it so often did.

"You're right." He nodded, blew the bangs out of his eyes. "He does. So what do we do?"

Violet knelt next to Mystery Guy and proceeded to go through his pockets. A wallet. Credit cards, forty-eight dollars in cash. I.D. An Illinois driver's license bearing a name that sounded like an alias. "Jackson Rippner," she said, looking at Mystery Guy's picture. "Ooh, _badass_."

"I don't know," said Neil, as he returned Mystery Guy the compliment of being tied hand and foot. He felt a whole lot better when there was a wall of knots between Jackson Rippner and that knife, which was now keeping company with the fake Oscar on Neil's desk. "From what I've seen, it seems about right."

"And... ta-da." From the breast pocket of Rippner's jacket, Violet produced the latest and greatest toy from Nokia. She held it so Neil could see while she scrolled through Rippner's contacts.

At "three" on speed-dial, they found it. "Company," only all in lowercase.

"I bet that's them," Violet said.

"_Who_-them?"

"The shady not-quite-sanctioned-by-the-government organization he works for."

Neil had stopped at "shady." His brain still wasn't up to that much hyphenation. He watched as Violet punched "three" on Jackson Rippner's speed-dial and held the Nokia to her ear.

"It's ringing," she whispered, holding her hand over the mouthpiece. "How much do we ask for?"

"I don't really— I'm pretty sure I don't have the receipt for the— Uh, two hundred?"

Violet nodded. She waited through either three seconds of silence or a very brief greeting as someone picked up on the other end. And then she snarled into the Nokia: "We have Jackson Rippner. And we want _five hundred dollars_ for him. Or _else_."

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	2. Chapter 2

**A/N:** Hey, guys, thanks for the kind comments! Very much appreciated! And now, just when you thought it was safe to go back in the— well, wherever you think it's usually safe to go back in, it's time for Chapter Two of this sorry thing. Enjoy!

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An early-June thunderstorm was rolling in off of Lake Michigan, and it was data-clean-up night at the company-lowercase-"c." The shady not-quite-sanctioned-by-the-government organization that had Jackson Rippner on its payroll. Might have been, back in the forties or fifties, maybe even the sixties, that data-clean-up night would have involved a whole lot of burning in steel barrels out back, some very fine shredding, maybe a couple of mysterious packages weighted down and dropped into the black depths of the big lake. Not any more. Now data-clean-up night meant giving the database staff the evening off and running a suite of programs with names like CleanSweep and BitBGone while progress bars crept with all the speed of poleaxed caterpillars across the company's data-center computer monitors.

Three people were sitting in the aux-light shadows of the data center on that stormy night.

John Carter, the company's second-in-command, was a big, dark-haired guy with a face like a golden eagle's. Dangerous-looking. Just-plain dangerous, when it came down to it. Carter, who'd dealt his fair share of mayhem both mental and physical to those who had it coming, had forgotten his Kindle back at the family brownstone, and he was dying of boredom. He was staring with eyes as pit-shadowy as a minion's from _The_ _Omen_ at one of those creeping progress bars. If the thing had any sense, and it could see the eyes smoldering at it from the other side of the screen, it might've gotten a move on. As it was, it had no damn sense at all, or it knew it was a progress bar for a computer program and consequently pretty much safe from kneecapping, knuckle-smashing, or consignment to the flames of Hell, so it was taking its own damn time.

Across the way from Carter sat his wife, Claire. She was tall even sitting down, and she had a rangy frame, storm-at-sea blue eyes, and shortish gold-blonde hair that looked perpetually like it had gone head to head with a force-nine gale and the gale had won. If John Carter was just-plain dangerous, she was dangerous-period. Period-period. She was the company-lowercase-c's number-one. She was sitting at a data station with the foot of one long blue-jeaned leg propped up between two computer monitors, but, unlike Carter, she wasn't staring death at any progress bars. She was looking down through half-moon reading glasses at a lap full of knitting. A table runner. Sister-in-law's birthday coming up. Deadlines to hit, all that.

"Well, that's something you don't hear every day," said the third person in the data center. His name was Paul Miller, he was sitting a ways away from the other two, and he was the company's chief of data services. He was in his mid-thirties, built kind of like Jackson Rippner, only where Rippner came off as sort of sleek and deadly, like a shark with human DNA or vice-versa, a kind of fresh-century update on the Creature from the Black Lagoon, it was like Paul was made partly of grasses. A little like a scarecrow, only he looked like he'd still grow if you watered him. Goldish-red wheat for his hair, whitish pampas grass for his eyebrows. Eyes like the reflection of clouds off a windshield on a rainy cold April morning. The company's switchboard had rolled a call over to his phone. To take it, Miller'd put down a Game Boy that John Carter was maybe two bored minutes away from killing him for, even if he was more than half sure that Miller had nothing loaded on it but solitaire and Mario Golf. Miller had picked up the receiver; he'd listened, jotted a few notes on a pad of paper by his left elbow; he'd hung up.

Carter, maybe too busy fuming about the Kindle, and the latest from Ian Rankin, that he'd left behind on the kitchen counter, continued to glare silent poison at that progress bar. Claire was the one who took the bait. "What's that, Paul?"

"Rippner's been kidnapped."

Claire started without starting really all that much at all. Raised her eyebrows, that was about it, while she clicked her way through a particularly tricky stitch. "Who has him, and how much do they want?"

"Let's see." Paul had a live CPU at his station, one that wasn't grinding like a tectonic plate in need of a hip replacement through DataScrubR, and he could see the real-time transcript of the call on his monitor. "Said the name was Roger Corman. Odd: it was a woman calling. No match on the voice as yet. They want five hundred dollars."

"Dollars?" Carter roused himself from his ugly staredown with BitBGone. "The word wasn't 'thousand' by any chance, was it?"

"Nope. Five hundred dollars. That's what she said."

Claire wrapped up her yarn. "Oh, dear, he's not going to like that." She removed her readers and folded the bows. "Do we have a drop point?"

"Fast Eddie's Surplus on University. Third floor, aisle eighteen, bottom shelf on the left. Between the box of grenade pins and the assorted plastic manatees."

"I know that place," said Carter. "A hundred ways in and out. It's like a maze once you get inside."

"Did they give us a timeframe?" Claire asked.

"'Or else,'" Paul replied. "That's all. Other details, let's see... Small, unmarked bills. And— get this— the call came from Rippner's phone."

"Jackson isn't participating in any drug trials, is he?" Carter leaned back in his chair and looked over at his better half. "Experimental hallucinogens, maybe?"

"Not to my knowledge," replied Claire. "Tell me, Paul, is the homing chip in Jackson's phone still activated?"

"Yes, it is. Triangulating now. Got it—"

Claire and Carter got up, stretching Rip van Winkle kinks from an assortment of long limbs, and joined Miller at his work station as the GPS data from Rippner's phone loaded on his monitor screen.

"Gumshoe Video." Miller frowned. "I don't get it. Is that a front?"

"No, it's a video store, Paul," said Claire.

"Do those even still exist?"

Carter didn't wait for the answer. He was already heading for the door. Mentally, he was about three seconds away from hearing that BitBGone progress bar warble "I don' know nothin' 'bout birthin' no babies," and when that happened, he was going to snap. The burning of Atlanta, hell: the Culver backlot was going to go up all over again, right here, right now. Metaphorically speaking. "I can have a team over there in five minutes, Claire."

"Hold on, big man. Gumshoe Video, Paul: data, please."

Carter halted and backtracked while Miller Googled up a web page. Which included photos, though it might've been better if it hadn't. What those photos showed was a ratty little hole-in-the-wall on the west side of town. VHS boxes on wire racks and on library shelves along the walls, a black cast-iron toad of an antique cash register squatting on the front counter. Posters for movies that staggered like drunks along the line between "cheese" and "cheesecake."

"Mm, classy. Well, now we know where the Corman reference came from." Claire read over Miller's shoulder. "'Specializing in the old, rare, and hard-to-find'."

Carter was feeling less inclined to reflect. "There's an address? Good." He recommenced his charge for the door. "I'm going."

"Stop," said Claire. Something had caught her eye on the site's ABOUT US page. A black-and-white photo of a guy named Neil Lewis. _Proprietor._ Who, done up in a trench coat and a fedora, was doing a very bad Bogart.

And a slightly less bad Jackson Rippner.

"The old," Claire mused, to the lanky kid who might have been Rippner's geek double. The double you might've ended up with if you sent a buck ninety-five plus seventy-five cents shipping and handling to an address on the back page of _Weird Tales_ for a do-it-yourself cloning kit in 1958. "Oldies," she muttered. On impulse, she added: "Paul, call Lisa Reisert and tell her to stop by the office, would you?" She glanced at Carter. "I've got seventy-five bucks on me. How much do you have?"

Carter dug in his pockets. "Thirty-two and change."

"Paul?"

Paul offered up the contents of his wallet. "Twenty-six."

Claire gathered and sorted the bills. "I'll pick up the rest on the way."

"Need my cash card?" Carter asked.

"No, sweets, I've got mine."

"So who gets the Jag?"

"You do." Claire held an open palm out to Miller; he grudgingly passed her his car keys.

"Back in one piece, please," he said.

"Pessimist." Claire preceded Carter to the door. "John, find out what you can about Mr. Lewis and his cohorts. Paul, tell Lisa to meet us here in an hour. We'll be right back."

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"I know a guy." Or "I know these guys." Violet's all-purpose answer to everything. "Everything" being, right now, the question "What do we do with the knife-wielding lunatic we're being stupid enough to hold for ransom?" Usually, Neil didn't listen when "I know these guys" entered a conversation. Or he did the mental equivalent of sticking his fingers in his ears and chanting "La, la, la, if I ignore it, it will go away." Tonight, though, she got him. He was shaken up, he was still strung out from the holdup, and he was wearing the black tuxedo pants from Horror Night's Dracula costume, because Jackson-The-Psycho-Ladd-Rippner had cut his khakis off of him before hanging him from the ceiling fan.

And which is why they, and Jackson Rippner, in a thundering rain, found themselves at Java the Hut's Coffee and Tattoos. Which, due to an exercise in creative leasing, shared a huge, dusty storeroom with PC Bargain World.

Violet parked them out back, near the delivery door. They were in her '68 GTO convertible, which even with the top up was only about the most conspicuous car on Earth. But Neil's Contour didn't pack nearly the same oomph in the cartage department. Not when it came to hauling bound-and-gagged psychopaths, anyway.

Violet smiled at him from the driver's side when they got out. Affectionately slapped the Pontiac's gray fender. "And you said this thing didn't have enough trunk space."

"I was being facetious, actually." Neil blinked rainwater out of his eyes as he fumbled with the trunk lock. Honestly, the GTO's back end could comfortably sleep a family of four. He wondered if any of the blood had re-entered his face. Just before he'd closed the trunk lid for the ride over, Jackson Rippner had come to and looked up at him, and even though they'd stuck a patch of packing tape over the guy's mouth, Neil had looked into those icy eyes and heard the words as clear as crystal in his head—

_You're dead._

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There were two "these guys" waiting for them in the storeroom Java the Hut shared with PC Bargain World. One was Owen, who might have made an early career out of chasing parked cars. Former surfer. Sand-blonde hair, built. Violet had explained on the way over how, years back, before he'd migrated to the Windy City, he'd had a full-face meet-cute with the piling of a pier in San Diego. "Don't worry, man," he said to Neil, once Rippner was settled, seated, mouth-taped, and glaring holy hell with those Antichrist eyes, between two boxed stacks of vintage gumdrop iMacs. "No matter what happens, we've got your back."

"Speak for yourself." Joe, with eyes as black and flat as a shark's, seemingly a little too tightly wound, was "these guys" number two. He had pale skin and long curly black hair, and as far as Neil was concerned, he was only slightly less scary than Rippner. "I am not Spartacus."

"Who said— Did I say you were Spartacus?"

"In so many words."

"The hell I did. I never said anyone was Spartacus."

"Well, whether you said it or not, I'm still not Spartacus. You: you can be Spartacus. See how you like it when Laurence Olivier corners you in a hot tub and starts asking you about clams."

"Oysters," said Neil. "It was oysters. Snails and—"

"Fuck you. Who asked you?"

"Jesus, dude," Owen said, "how much caffeine have you had today?"

"Been doing espresso shots since noon. You know that."

Violet placed a palm on Neil's chest, looked up at him with concern. "You look a little of out of it. You want to go get some sleep?"

"No—" He had to force himself not to look at Joe and the guy's razor's-edge eyes. Which, combined with Rippner's psycho death-stare, were really starting to creep him out. "But I need a couple aspirin. Maybe I'll grab a sandwich. Will you be okay here?"

"It's not like I'll be alone."

"Uhh, right." Neil gave her a quick kiss. "I'll be right back."

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Back home, Neil took those aspirin. Followed them up with a peanut-butter sandwich. And then he set the travel alarm he kept on the coffee table and flopped down on the couch. His head still hurt. Just for a second, a quick nap. Fifteen minutes of closing his eyes—

#####

He woke up. Started awake from a dream in which Jackson Rippner was Major Strasser and Neil was Rick, only instead of pistols they were duking it out with lightsabers while Jabba, who was no longer a Hutt (whatever the hell a Hutt really was) but a giant snail with Sydney Greenstreet's face, kept Lisa Reisert, dressed in a bikini, a slouch hat, and a trench coat, on a chain hooked to a slave collar around her neck.

Neil got up. Scratched his sides, walked muzzily out to the kitchen. Smelled coffee. (Odd: he didn't remember making coffee.) Opened the fridge. There was someone sitting in the shadows at the kitchen table. Took out the milk, took a long drink from the carton. There was someone sitting in the shadows at the kitchen table. Put the carton back, shut the refrigerator door. There was someone sitting in the shadows at th—

You know how in _Alien_? How in _Alien_ it's right there, the alien is right there, and Veronica Cartwright looks? And it's right there? And she looks at it without looking at it, and it's right there, and she looks at it without really looking at it, and it's right there? And by the time she's looking at it, and really looking at it, it's really right there, and it's too late?

It was kind of like that.

Neil looked without looking, and then he looked again. And then, kind of like Veronica Cartwright, he shrieked.

"Aaaahhhh—!"

"Neil Lewis?" asked the someone in the shadows.

Lightning flashed at the kitchen window. Thunder cracked. The guy sitting at the table was dressed all in black, and he looked like the third Exorcist. Or like whatever the other two were trying to exorcise from Linda Blair. Or maybe like Christopher Lee, fresh off of _Horror of Dracula._ Only the bigger, scarier version.

"Who are you?"

"My name is John Carter."

"Wuh-wuh-warlord of Mars?"

"Not according to my wife. You have one of our agents."

"Oh, shit—"

"Relax; it's okay."

"What the fuck do you mean, 'it's okay'?"

"I just want to ask you a few questions. Have a seat."

"I screamed, didn't I?"

"It wasn't that loud. Happens to all of us. Don't worry about it."

Neil nodded. Tried to relax, or to look like he was. Then he charged for the kitchen counter. Grabbed for something, anything. Which anything turned out to be the white plastic waffle maker Lucien had given him for a housewarming present five years ago. ("Jerry Lewis would've wanted it this way" had been on the gift tag, though Neil had been pretty sure Jerry Lewis wasn't dead at the time. Or now, for that matter.) He swung the thing at John Carter's head. In the space of that swing, Carter was out of his chair. He set down his coffee cup. He stepped behind Neil as if Neil were standing still, twisted his arm behind his back, and mashed his face into the table top.

Carter reached for his coffee cup with his free hand. "Drop it, please."

Neil dropped the waffle maker.

"Have I been flirting with your girlfriend, too?" he asked the table top.

"My wife hasn't mentioned any extraneous flirtation of late, no. Now, if I let you go, will you attack me with the toaster?"

"No."

"The salt-and-pepper shakers, perhaps?"

"N-no."

"Color me relieved." Carter let him up, sat back down. "Mr. Rippner is alive and well?"

"You're trespassing. B-b-burgling, for all I know—"

"Well, I believe I have you on extortion and kidnapping, so I win."

"Okay."

Carter gestured politely to the chair opposite his; Neil took a seat.

"And now— this is really good coffee, by the way— about Mr. Rippner."

Who Neil had left with Violet. And with two overly caffeinated tattoo artists. At least one of whom seemed to be at least a week off his Thorazine. "As far as I know, he's fine."

"Good. Now tell me what he did."

"What he—"

"You're not a professional kidnapper, are you, Mr. Lewis? No, of course you aren't. What did he do to deserve a vacation in the storeroom of PC Bargain World? I will assume, given your earlier query, that flirtation had something to do with it."

"How do you know where he—"

He stopped talking. He shut up. He'd said too much, and he knew it. And he was so scared that it wasn't even a followup cliche when Carter replied: "It's my job to know these things."

So Neil explained. Confessed, morelike. Carter's dark stare was the polar opposite of an interrogation lamp, but every bit as effective. Neil told him everything. The goon. The stabbing. The Domino's, because Sal's was closed. Coming to strung up upside-down from the ceiling fan. The one thing he changed was the bit with the Oscar. Violet he left out. Didn't mention her at all. He'd been the one to clock Rippner in the head, even though how he'd managed to reach the Oscar from the fan would've been an impossibility in anybody's book. Afterward, he'd jiggled himself loose; he'd jiggled the fan loose, too; he'd been mad about it; he'd decided to hold Rippner for—

"Wait a minute," said John Carter. "The fan. Was it a Hunter?"

Neil didn't bother asking how Carter knew. It was the guy's job to know those things, right? "Yeah."

"Expensive?"

"Uhh, sort of. Yeah."

"Thank you, Mr. Lewis. That's all I need to know."

And with that, John Carter reached inside his black leather jacket.

"Oh, no," Neil breathed.

Why hadn't he grabbed for the toaster? The dish soap? Or, yes, in retrospect, the salt-and-pepper shakers? An eyeful of salt would've burned like hell. Or pepper. Pepper might even have been worse, when you thought about it. But now it was too late.

Neil closed his eyes. Held what had to be his final breath. _I'm sorry, Violet. I'm sorry it was Lisa Reisert in that dream. You know it didn't mean anything, right? You know you'll always be the girl in the bikini and the trench coat—_

"Hey, gorgeous," said John Carter.

Neil flinched. Then, unshot, unstabbed, and unstrangled, he opened his eyes and looked. Across from him, Carter had a cell phone to his right ear. As Neil watched, he pushed back his chair and stood up.

"— yeah, yeah: I'm finished here. You were right about— Yeah. Yeah, no worries. See you back at base. Bye." Carter put his phone back in his pocket. He looked down at Neil. "Our people will take it from here, Mr. Lewis. Thank you for the coffee."

He left. Neil waited for his heart to stop banging against his sternum. He waited until he could breathe without fireworks popping at the backs of his eyes. Then he got up, ran for the GTO, and drove like hell for Java the Hut and PC Bargain World.

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	3. Chapter 3

**A/N:** Sorry for the delay. Was out of town. _Way_ out of town. But I'm back with an ending, if not with a vengeance, and it is most silly. Thanks for your patience; thanks for reading this thing. Oh, and for a certain someone who didn't get a cameo, howzabout a dedication instead? This one's for you, N. You're the best!

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The lot was empty.

Neil parked the GTO where he and Violet had parked before, right near the deliveries entrance Java the Hut shared with PC Bargain World. The rain was coming down harder than ever. On the ragtop of the Pontiac, it sounded like a million midgets landing wet knockout punches. When Neil removed the V-8's throaty rumble from the equation, though, the whole world felt too still. As if the rain were silencing everything but the pounding of his heart. He took a deep breath, got out into the downpour, and ran for the door. Instantly, his t-shirt was soaked through. The legs of the tux pants from the Dracula costume, too, as puddled water splattered up his calves. His bangs plastered themselves over his eyes.

He grabbed for the slippery industrial doorknob. Twisted it. Threw the door open and found what he'd expected, what he'd been choking on, wrapped in morbid fear, at every single red light on the way back. And every single light on the way back _had_ been red. The behemoth who called himself John Carter: he'd known about Rippner. About PC Bargain World. About the damned fan. Knowing how to make traffic lights turn red would be no problem whatsoever for a guy like that.

So it was that Neil got back to the storeroom and walked in on the scene of a slaughter. Blood. Bodies everywhere. Or maybe not everywhere, since there'd been only three people in addition to Rippner in the storeroom when Neil went on his aspirin run. So George Romero might not have been impressed by the level of carnage. Let alone Tobe Hooper. It was gore straight-from-the-pits-of-Warhol enough for Neil, and that's what he walked in on.

Or he might have.

If he hadn't been just a little bit ahead of himself. The door was locked.

He yanked at the wet doorknob, whumped the door with a fist. "Violet—?"

A man's voice, muffled through the double-core metal, called back: "Who is it, please?"

"The fuck— It's me. Neil. Open the door—!"

"Hold on a sec. How do we know it's you?"

"It's me!"

"Wait, wait. Hang on."

A block of silence from the other side of the door. Maybe thirty seconds' worth. Neil ducked his head so the rainwater wouldn't run directly from his bangs into his eyes. It slalomed off the tip of his nose instead.

"Okay," the man's voice said. "What did it say on the chest plates of the space suits in _Dark Star_?"

"Lucien, is that you? I will fucking kill you."

A moment of silent conference from the far side of the door. Then: "Uh, wrong. Care to try again?"

"Ekco. As in muffin tins. As in _let me the hell in—!_"

The door opened. Owen stood there, looking hurt. "We thought there should be some kind of password. You don't have to get pissy about it, man."

Neil pushed past him. Looked desperately around the storeroom. At Violet and Joe, who had a laminated book of tattoo designs opened up on a packing crate between them. At the shadows that seemed to be everywhere. Even up at the damned rafters. "Is he here yet? Where is he?"

Violet broke off from examining a page full of what looked like dragons crossed with butterflies. She came over. "Who, Neil?"

"At the house, there was this— Dracula. He looked like Dracula. Big as a— He was in the house, Violet—"

She repeated, calmly: "Who?"

"Lock that—!" Neil gestured to the door, to Owen. Flailed, morelike. Like his hand was a flipper. Something out of _The Island of Doctor Moreau_. The crappy one with David Thewlis. Water droplets flew from his fingertips. Owen obligingly re-locked the door. "He said his name was John Carter—"

"Like Arthur-Conan-Doyle John Carter?" Joe asked, suspiciously.

"It's Edgar Rice Burroughs, man," said Owen.

"Die," Joe replied.

"No— Yes." Neil shook his head. The others recoiled from the spray coming off his hair. "No. He was asking about Rippner; he knew about this place—"

"Whatever it is you're smoking, man, I do _not_ want any," said Owen.

"And he looked like Dracula," Violet said.

Neil frowned so hard his headache twitched in its grave. "What are you saying, Violet?"

"I thought I was the owner of the over-active imagination."

"What is that supposed to—"

"Shh. Neil, Neil. Shh. Did you take a nap?"

Owen ambled off and came back with a stack of folded white paper towels from the dispenser in the restroom. He offered them to Neil. Neil took them, started to mop himself off. "Maybe ten minutes. I just closed my eyes. Violet, we have to get out of—"

"You fell asleep. And when you woke up, Dracula was sitting at the kitchen table."

"Well, he _looked_ like Dracula. Like Christopher Lee, only—"

"You were dreaming," Violet said gently. As if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Maybe it was. "You thought you woke up—"

"— and Bruce Lee was sitting at the kitchen table," Owen finished. "Happens to me all the time."

Slightly calmer, Neil looked around again. Checked out Rippner. Or what must have been Rippner, still sitting on the floor between the stacks of iMac boxes. "Uh, what is that?"

"He was really weirding us out with those eyes," Joe said.

"He was weirding _you_ out," Owen clarified.

A box from a Dalmatian iMac was covering Rippner's head and shoulders. The iMac itself was sitting beside him like a loyal polka-dotted thirty-seven-pound gumdrop.

Neil whispered, with the hesitation of a guy who just realized he was skiing in the Tetons during avalanche season: "But he's okay, right...?"

"He's fine," Violet said. "A little pissed off, but okay." She kissed him. "Mmm, peanut butter. The guys wanted to give him a tattoo—"

"— just a little one. A butterfly—" said Owen.

"A ladybug, dick," countered Joe. "On his right butt cheek."

"Left."

"Whatever."

"— but they couldn't make up their minds," Violet continued, "so we settled on—"

Owen nudged her silent.

Perspiration peppered Neil's hairline. Made his pores itch through his coating of rainwater. He was pretty certain that if someone held a contest for "Understatement of the Millennium," "a little pissed off" would be a lock for first place. "What?"

Violet just smiled. "And then we got the call about the money, and we're good to go."

"What call? Who—?"

"She said her name was Claire, that the money was right where we wanted it, and that we could have our choice of Dumpsters."

A low chuckle rumbled out from under the Dalmatian box.

_And you thought you were dead before, Mr. Lewis,_ the chuckle said.

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Wednesday morning. A little short of eight a.m.

There'd been a mistake. A minor hitch in the logistics. Consisting simply of the fact that the Dumpster behind Lewandusky's Midwestern Seafood contained one live body instead of four dead ones. When the heavy metal lid creaked up and opened wide and Jackson Rippner blinked in the glare of the muggy morning sun, he knew why. The Carters had handed his rescue-slant-nightmare-of-revenge off to their number-one recruit, their replacement-in-training, and, being new to the turf, she'd fudged the details. Forgivably, as far as Rippner was concerned.

He smiled up at his savior. His very own mostly-angel. "Hello, Lise."

Lisa Reisert's beautiful face was the very portrait of concern. "Jackson, are you alright—?"

"Nothing a blast from a fire hose won't fix, baby."

That, and a couple of nimble fingertips. The black-haired one in Lewis's gang of morons had had the bright idea of supplementing Rippner's restraints with industrial-size twist-ties. Fucking twist-ties. If they'd left it at ropes and knots, he'd have freed himself hours ago. But twist-ties. Big suckers. Like he was a damn loaf of Wonder Bread or something. At least they hadn't Dumpstered him with that fucking computer box still over his head.

For the _nth_ time since he'd been clocked and caught, he found himself getting mad. He breathed it away through a funk of odors he'd just as soon not name by name as Lisa climbed into the Dumpster and got to work on his wrists, and pretty much the breathing worked. He felt calmer with the promise of carnage to come. But as his gorgeous one-and-only partway cut him loose, and untwisted the rest, and he boosted her first and then hoisted his stiff carcass over the Dumpster's rusty green side, Rippner got to thinking. Started to see it as odd that only she showed up to rescue him, or liberate him, or claim him, or whatever word wasn't as big a nut-punch to his ego.

No, wait: it had been maintenance night back at the company. Most everyone would have been off. And a solo job was good experience for the girl Claire Carter had picked to follow in her footsteps.

Not that he wasn't irritated. For one thing, he smelled like the back room of a liquor store. Or a Fuzzy Buffalo courtesy of a biker bar. Even though, up until round about five a.m., when he'd been heaved into the Dumpster behind Lewandusky's Midwestern Seafood, where they'd been keeping him had been the back room of a computer store and a fucking coffee-bar-slant-tattoo-shop, he smelled that way. Dusty, alcoholic, kinda sweaty, kinda sickly sweet, like glue. The kind of smell it would take two trips to the dry cleaner to get out of his suit. He wasn't happy about that. Still, he was free, and in one piece, and within two hours he'd have revenge on Neil Lewis, his whackjob girlfriend, and those other two idiots.

The ones with the tattoo gun. Rippner's molars ground together as the muscles in his jaw tightened.

Pretty much on cue, Lisa asked: "Is your hip okay?" She frowned his way as he got into the car she'd picked for his retrieval. One of his Beamers. "You were limping."

Rippner lowered his backside gingerly into the leather seat of the black Five Series. She had to come for him in the Five, didn't she? The thing would be smelling like a landfill by the time they got home. What he said was: "It's nothing."

What he was really thinking was _Those assholes are dead_.

Rumor had it the tattoo on his butt said _Badass,_ in classic Harley-Davidson script. "You want to come back later," the blonde guy had said, the super-idiot, the one who'd obviously taken one too many shots to the head, "and we can add a little picture of a donkey. On the house."

"An ass, ass." That from the one with the black hair. Captain Twist-Tie. The one who was going to learn that there was a special level of Hell reserved for podunk tattoo artists.

"I like 'donkey' better."

In the Beamer, Rippner shook fury-coated cobwebs from his thoughts. "Think I'll get cleaned up, and then I've got business to finish, Lise."

"Business at Gumshoe Video?"

They were paused at the mouth of the pot-holed driveway leading out from behind Lewandusky's, while Lisa sought a break big enough for the Five in the lumbering stream of trucks carrying stuff to and from the area's wholesalers. Rippner looked at her, maybe hoping for a second that his eyes could still do to her what they did to pretty much everyone else. That is to say, freeze her dead in her tracks. But nope. She was Rikki-Tikki-Tavi to his Nag. And he pretty much knew it.

"Partly. Yeah. Won't take long."

"Okay," said Lisa, blithely.

That knocked him off-balance. "Okay—?"

"I want to help."

"You do...?"

The panel trucks and bobtail tractors were still parading by in a steady stream. Lisa reached over and squeezed Rippner's thigh. Then she leaned in close and whispered, with her lips feather-brushing his ear, even though he smelled like someone who had spent the last three hours in a Dumpster behind a fish store: "I think it's time we did a job together, don't you?"

"I, umm— Okay."

"Good." She settled back in behind the wheel and swung the Five out into traffic. "'Many hands make light the work.' Isn't that how it goes?"

"Sure. Only I thought-"

"Thought what? That certain aspects of your job didn't appeal to me?"

"I, uh— Yeah."

"Well, it's all part of the learning curve, right? Part of the package? There's just one thing."

"What's that?"

"Nothing, really. Actually, no: it's related. Two minor home-improvement projects. We only have to do one; you get to pick."

How home-improvement anything could be related to offing Video-Store Yutz and His Posse of Ink-Needle Losers, Rippner couldn't begin to imagine. "Mmm, okay. What are they?"

"One: we can build a doghouse."

Rippner tried not to sound enthusiastic. One of his few soft spots was reserved for pooches. "We're getting a dog?"

"Not exactly."

They were at a light. Lisa took a moment to turn and look at him. A little too sweetly. A little too directly.

"What's the second one?" Rippner asked, a kind of chill settling over him, as the signal went from red to green. Once upon a time, he'd hit her with a phrase. A comparison, sort of. "Male-driven, fact-based logic." That, versus "emotion-based female dilemma." Now, he realized, she was flipping that equation on him. Skewing it, screwing it, and hitting him back with it, right in the kisser.

"You can help a friend of mine install a ceiling fan."

A long pause fluttered down to roost between them. In a voice that sounded maybe a little smaller than usual, Rippner said: "I thought he, uh, might be bothering you."

"Bothering me? Do you mean to say 'flirting with me,' Jackson?"

"Lisa, I was—" Rippner took a deep breath. Practically none of it filtered through to his vocal cords. "— jealous."

"You were jealous of Neil. The film geek who runs my favorite video store." Lisa looked him dead in the eye. "Now, not only are you not going to kill him, or his girlfriend, or anyone having anything to do with Gumshoe Video or Java the Hut, you are going to apologize. And you are paying for that tattoo, Mr. Badass. Whether you go back for the donkey or not."

Rippner tried to bristle. Tried to puff himself up like the hard-as-tacks killer he was. Tried to look as sharp and cold as his favorite fixed-blade CRKT, if that fixed-blade had been stuck in the freezer in a box of Popsicles. Lisa was having none of it. She turned her attention back to the rush-hour traffic and kept it there.

_It's an ass, Lise._ Rippner gave the bristle routine another second, then deflated into the leather seat. Scrunched his shoulders, crossed his arms across his smelly chest, and stared out the windshield of the Beamer at the stumpy back end of the lime-green Prius hopscotching through the stop-and-go ahead of them. He glanced over at her. She might have almost been glancing back, out of the corner of her eye. But not quite. _Pretty much goes without saying, doesn't it?_

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The ceiling was patched. The new fan was up. And no one died in the meantime. At least no one from Gumshoe or Java the Hut. Which left the four of them, that being Neil and Violet, Lisa and Rippner, a sunny June day or so later, with a cooler full of ice and Goose Island beer and mixed-pairs basketball in a park not far from Violet's place. In shorts and t-shirts, Rippner and Violet were currently on the half-court, playing according to what they said were Australian rules. Which seemed to be a polite way of saying "no fucking rules whatsoever." They didn't seem to mind in the least that Lisa and Neil played H.O.R.S.E. when they took to the court. Only, Rippner had said, maybe looking a little too intently at Neil, kind of like a hawk at a kangaroo rat, just wait 'til they got to Tasmanian-rules softball.

For the time being, Neil was safe on the bench. He lounged against the recycled plastic back-slats and took a swig from a bottle of IPA and watched Violet fly feet-first at Rippner's head. Right through the air, nearly six feet up. Rippner swatted her aside like it was no big deal, like people flew at his head all the time, but still: "She _does_ know kung-fu. Holy shit."

"Hey, Danger Man!" Lisa yelled at Rippner. "Are you planning on shooting anytime this year?"

Rippner sidestepped Violet, sank his shot. Grinned toward the bench while Violet scooped up the rebound. "Nag, nag, nag."

Neil went thoughtful. "Does it ever get..."

Lisa leaned back, sipped her beer. "... less unordinary?"

"I might have said 'less fucking weird,' but yeah."

"No. But that's okay. Better than okay, most days. Know what I mean?"

Neil watched his crazy girl, Lisa's crazy guy. He smiled. Sure, he might have been a little drunk, but the fact remained: All about balance, wasn't it? Or a really good microbrew. Cosmological or right here. The ones who make us a little crazy while we make them a little sane. The ones we love.

"Yeah," he said.

On the court, Rippner caught an elbow right in the face.

"Gotcha," said Violet.

"The hell you did," Rippner growled. He got in under the next dribble and stole the ball. "You got lucky, and I walked into it."

Neil focused his incredulity through a summery amber haze of beer. The guy's ego was really that big. He was actually hijacking the credit for getting hit. In the meantime, blood was practically gushing from his nostrils. He didn't seem to notice. Neither did Violet.

"Is that supposed to bleed like that?" Neil asked Lisa.

"It should be okay unless— Jackson? Honey?"

"Yeah, babe?"

"Little time-out?"

Rippner and Violet exchanged a nod. "Sure," he said.

He trotted over while Lisa got up to meet him. Tipped his head back to let her check his nose.

Neil met Violet coming off the court. "How's it going?"

"Okay, I think. Yeah." She felt her right side. "Don't think it's broken. Maybe I'll let you kiss it better later." She gave Neil a smooch, then looked over at Lisa and Jackson, who was copping an affectionate feel while Lisa rolled ice cubes from the cooler into a workout towel. "Aren't they a cute couple?"

The four of them had brought along sandwiches and a picnic blanket in addition to the beer, and Rippner stretched out on his back on the grass and the tartan fleece with his head in Lisa's lap while she held the towel to his bleeding nose. It looked to Neil like he was looking up at the sky. Probably seeing automatics, knives, and chalk outlines in the puffy clouds. More likely, he was gazing up at Lisa.

"Yeah." In a weird way, or maybe in a not-so-weird way, they were.

"Did you see the scar on his neck?" Violet asked.

"The fang marks over his jugular from when he became one of the undead?"

"Mmm— no." Mild perplexity. Violet kissed the tip of her right index finger and touched it lightly to the base of Neil's throat. "Right about... there. Lisa stabbed him with a pen."

"She did?"

"Mm hm. The day they met. I think it's romantic."

"You learned that... when?"

"When we were playing ball. That last inning."

"All I heard was swearing and grunting."

A sly smile. An affectionate kiss. "You have to listen more closely, Neil."

Across the way, Rippner was gingerly feeling around his nostrils. He examined his bloody fingertips. "Who's up for bagel dogs?" he called. "Something's got me thinking 'ketchup.'"

Neil spoke before he could stop himself. The Goose Island made him do it. "You're treating, man," he called back.

"What am I, made of money?" Rippner glared as he sat up. But not a glare like the glare from the trunk of the GTO. That glare would have frozen Michigan a full foot deep, all the way to Milwaukee. This glare would barely have glazed the waves. And Rippner was smiling, even if he might have said it was only for Lisa, as he got up and she shook out the blanket, and the two of them headed off toward the hotdog stand across the park.

Violet retrieved the basketball while Neil closed up the cooler. She nodded after Rippner and Lisa. "See how easy it is to make new friends?"

"Yeah." Kidnapping, ceiling fans, Dracula at the kitchen table, potential cracked ribs, and nasal hemorrhaging aside, it was downright simple. Especially on a day like today.

Neil smiled. And it wasn't just the Goose Island smiling for him, either. He caught Violet's free hand in his, and they set off for the hotdog stand.

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**THE END**


End file.
